Preserve Your Finest Hour with a 3D Printed Cosplay Selfie

Bored with 3D Selfies? How about a 3D Printed Cosplay Selfie? An action figure of your very own, coming soon to a convention hall near you.

So you’ve spent weeks creating your cosplay garb (possibly with the help of 3D printing). You’ve rocked the masquerade, dazzled the crowds, and taken dozens of photos with your new chums. But does it feel like something is missing? A gaping existential void, perhaps…?

Let’s fill it with a 3D printed cosplay selfie, a remarkable hybrid of action figure and personal memento. Artist Jo Kamm and his amazing 3D Print Photobooth were in attendance at the Kansas City Comic Con this past summer, and hundreds of eager cosplayers lined up to be 3D scanned. You can see a galley of them here.

The setup is pretty simple; a 3D camera-rigged Xbox Kinect and a turntable. The turntable slowly turns the model for the camera. This can take up to two minutes (but try not to wiggle). The 3D image is then recorded by the software.

Glow-in-the-dark 3D printed cosplay selfies!

This image is pretty sharp and can be viewed from any angle, and makes the perfect record of your costume. Once edited, the image can be 3D printed into an 8-inch figurine and prepared for painting — unless you’d prefer yours to be printed in glow-in-the-dark plastic.

The only downside is that process is rather lengthy, so participants had to wait until after the show is over to receive their own figurine. With each 3D printed cosplay selfie taking almost 40 hours to complete, a one-man-band like Kamm would have had plenty of work to do.

Thus far, the 3D Print Photobooth has been sticking to the Kansas-area, and no future appearances are planned for the moment. But it’s a fantastic complement to the burgeoning cosplay scene, and surely a matter of time before other folks adopt the idea for the worldwide convention circuit.